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Aug. 11, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
49:37
Goodbye To The Love Gov | Ep. 1316
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Time Text
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, the supposed hero of the COVID-19 pandemic, resigns from office.
Joe Biden makes some incredibly tone-deaf comments about it.
And Democrats everywhere push mask mandates.
Again, I'm Ben Shapiro.
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And there's a lot of news in just one moment.
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Alrighty, well.
There is a man who needs a drink.
That man's name, Andrew Cuomo.
He is no longer going to be governor of New York.
He's giving himself 14 days to slow the spread.
Apparently he is not going to resign for another two weeks, but he says he is leaving right as of now.
He said on Tuesday he will resign, relinquishing under extraordinary pressure his decade-long grip on power, heading off a potential impeachment by New York's Democratic-led legislature a week after the release of a report by the state AG found that he had sexually harassed 11 women.
Here is what it sounded like when Andrew Cuomo announced his resignation.
I think that given the circumstances, the best way I can help now is if I step aside and let government get back to governing.
And therefore, that's what I'll do.
Because I work for you.
And doing the right thing is doing the right thing for you.
Because as we say, it's not about me.
It's about we.
Oh my god.
It's not about me.
It's about we.
And by we, he means your breasts.
That is Andrew Cuomo.
Honestly, the guy's gonna have to step down from office after killing every old person in the state of New York and then covering it up because he allegedly groped a woman's breasts.
That's really what this is about.
Like, that's a bad thing to do.
But it seems like, you know, killing every elderly person in New York and then covering it up is a much worse thing to do.
And this is the thing that's so amazing.
There are really only two reasons why Cuomo is going down here.
One is because Cuomo is an inconvenient figure for Democrats at this time.
He's inconvenient because he actually did an unbelievably crappy job over the course of the last year during the pandemic.
New York, by all available statistics, still has the second highest death per million rate in the nation slightly after New Jersey.
Right now, New York has the fourth highest unemployment rate in America.
Hey, so those are not good stats from the governor of New York, who was championed as this wonderful, wonderful dude last year.
And so Democrats had a choice.
They could either rethink how they approach the pandemic and throw Cuomo under the bus on that score, or they could find another reason to throw him under the bus.
And conveniently enough, earlier this year, out came these allegations that he had been grabbing people's asses.
And that was a perfect excuse to go after Andrew Cuomo.
Beyond that, Andrew Cuomo has no allies, because here's the thing.
The media spent a year treating Andrew Cuomo like he was some sort of beloved figure in New York.
People HATE Andrew Cuomo in New York.
I'm talking about the political class.
The political class in New York, they despise Andrew Cuomo.
And there's a reason that Bill de Blasio hates him.
There's a reason that the entire New York State Legislature hates Andrew Cuomo.
He is a jerk.
Everybody who is in a position of power to save him It was like Batman.
At the end of Batman Begins, right?
They're not going to kill him, but they also don't have to save him.
Except this time, they actually were going to kill him.
And so he had to step back and step down.
And even now, he's still making it about himself.
Even as he steps down, he can't just apologize.
He has to just say, you know, it's it's it's not I'm not doing this for me.
I'm doing this for me.
And then he continues by saying that he apologizes for offending the women.
At no point does he ever say he did anything wrong, by the way.
See, the real reason that he's resigning here is because, you watch, within four years they're going to be talking about him coming back.
In fact, as we will see, members of the media are already talking about him coming back, and he's not even gone yet!
Like, give us a little time to miss him, gang!
But here is Andrew Cuomo apologizing for women being offended.
The most serious allegations made against me had no credible factual basis in the report.
And there is a difference between alleged improper conduct and concluding sexual harassment.
Now, don't get me wrong, this is not to say that there are not 11 women who I truly offended.
There are.
And for that, I deeply, deeply apologize.
Okay, so his line here is that he is very, very sorry that somebody was offended, but also he didn't do anything wrong.
He just sort of breached some etiquette by allegedly grabbing women and kissing them on the lips and touching them in weird ways and asking them weird questions and all the rest.
And this was his line throughout the presser, right?
He said, my sense of humor can offend people sometimes.
He just, you know, it's really on them because they get offended.
It's really not on Andrew Cuomo.
At no point here does he actually take full blame for anything that he has allegedly done, right?
Which is why he's leaving the door open.
Here's the thing.
Once it became clear he was going to be impeached, he had to resign because if he had been impeached, he could never come back.
But if he resigned, he could theoretically come back four years from now saying, well, you know, those allegations really never panned out.
And I stepped down because it was necessary for me to step down at the time.
But now that we know that those things didn't pan out, well, I think maybe I'll come back.
This is what happened with, for example, Senator Al Franken, right?
When Al Franken stepped down as senator from Minnesota over allegations of grasping women's behinds and rope lines.
We made New York State the progressive capital of the nation.
No other state government accomplished more to help people.
Andrew Cuomo then going on to try and defend his legacy, right? So even as he's leaving, he's defending his garbage legacy. We made New York State the progressive capital of the nation.
No other state government accomplished more to help people.
And that is what it's all about.
Just think about what we did. We passed marriage equality, creating a new civil right, legalized love for the LGBTQ community, and we generated a force for change that swept the nation.
Um...
you Really?
So your legacy is gay marriage and killing all the olds.
And lots of people leaving the state.
Like so many people leaving the state that you couldn't even raise taxes anymore because you were afraid that if you raised taxes anymore, every wealthy person in the state of New York was going to leave.
Again, What he's really doing here is he's just attempting to preserve a future political lifeline.
So don't take this the way the Democrats are taking this.
Look how wonderful we are.
We were going to stop him because we have principles.
And Andrew Cuomo resigned because Andrew Cuomo has... No, none of you people have principles because you're all politicians.
So shut up.
Okay, we'll get to more of this in just one second.
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All right, just as the proof that Andrew Cuomo is not actually apologetic about any of this, let's recall that before Andrew Cuomo actually resigned, his personal lawyer, a woman named Rita Glavin, Give a 42-minute monologue in which you just tore into everybody who had made an allegation about Andrew Cuomo.
So, for example, Cuomo's attorney trashed two accusers specifically.
One was named Brittany Camiso.
She, of course, is the woman who alleged that Andrew Cuomo had rubbed her butt and that he had then called her into his office and stuck his hand up her shirt.
And Lindsey Boylan, who had suggested that he had kissed her on the lips and then he had made inappropriate comments, Cuomo's attorney just There was also testimony by several witnesses about potential motives in what was going on with Ms.
about Andrew Cuomo actually admitting fault is precisely the opposite, right?
He wants to leave on his own terms before his impeachment sort of seals his record into stone.
There was also testimony by several evidence, by several witnesses about potential motives and what was going on with Ms. Camiso in late 2020 and early 2021.
And concerns she had about her job, that she had been turned down for a raise, and concerns that there was a possibility that because her work hours might change, she could be transferred.
You see, Ms.
Boylan had ran in a primary against Congressman Jerry Nadler.
And in March of 2020, when COVID started, the governor issued an executive order which narrowed the timeframe for people to get petitions so they could get on the ballot.
Ms.
Boylan was very unhappy about this and felt that that had been directed at her.
So why not stay and fight it out?
Really, I mean, you've got your lawyer out there making a 40-minute presentation about why all the accusers are not credible.
Why not stay and fight it out?
And the answer, of course, is that Cuomo had alienated so many people inside the Democratic Party that it didn't matter what evidence he provided on the other side.
He was going to be impeached.
I mean, Cuomo's attorney basically acknowledged this, and she said the investigators brought their own bias.
I mean, she's going after Attorney General Letitia James here, pointing out that Letitia James has her eye on the governor's seat, which of course is true.
The two investigators that were charged with this report, certainly, and it comes through when you read it, they brought their own biases.
Mr. Kim had pursued and supervised criminal investigations against the governor for years at that office.
And he actually personally interviewed him.
Personally interviewed Governor Cuomo in one of the criminal investigations.
And with respect to Ms.
Clark, as an attorney, her practice is focused on bringing sexual harassment and discrimination lawsuits on behalf of employees.
Okay, by the way, no one ever really goes away.
No one ever really dies when it comes to politics.
Unless you're dead.
And even then, maybe not.
It's like The Last Jedi.
Nobody ever really goes away.
It's not just Andrew who's not going to go away.
Apparently Chris is going to stick around too.
You know Chris is still advising him from CNN?
There's a report in the Washington Post that mentions, buried in paragraph 11, that Chris Cuomo is still advising his brother, despite the fact that basically he's been suspended from duty for advising his brother.
Now, the angle that Democrats are taking with regard to Cuomo leaving, it's a really strange angle.
Normally when somebody leaves, you don't celebrate them.
You don't talk about what a wonderful job they did.
Letitia James just put out 168 page report about what a terrible person Andrew Cuomo is.
And then she put out a statement saying, I thank Governor Cuomo for his contributions to our state.
I mean, like, what?
Joe Biden did the same thing, by the way.
He started off by saying he respected Cuomo's decision, and then he had to be told what Cuomo's decision was, and also who Andrew Cuomo was, because obviously the President of the United States is no longer with us, unfortunately.
But as we say, no one ever really dies.
Here is Joe Biden saying that he respects Andrew Cuomo's decision.
What is your reaction to Governor Cuomo's, uh, his announcement that he's stepping down?
You called on him to resign.
Did you think he would?
I respect the governor's decision and I respect the decision he made.
Okay, but the best comment here from Joe Biden is the most telling comment.
And that is when Biden feels the necessity to praise Cuomo.
Again, understand Democrats really wanted to cap Cuomo here.
For a couple of reasons.
One is that he's a jerk, but the other is that Cuomo is a really inconvenient figure for them.
They made a hero out of the guy and he was awful on COVID.
I cannot express this enough.
Andrew Cuomo had a COVID policy by which he shipped COVID positive elderly patients back into nursing homes, who then went on to infect everybody in the nursing homes.
And then, when these people got so sick they had to be shipped to the hospitals, he promptly had his death count not count them as nursing home patients.
Instead, they were counted as people who died outside nursing homes.
That was like somewhere between 9,000 and 11,000 elderly people who were counted as non-nursing home patients when they were actually nursing home patients when they got the disease and they were shipped out like a day before they died to the local hospital.
He was a bleep show on this stuff.
And he was treated as this sort of magical figure by the media.
And the Democrats can't let this go, because here's the thing.
Cuomo's model, which failed, and it did, it failed.
Cuomo's model is still the model Democrats are pursuing today.
Democrats like to purport that they have an answer to COVID.
They do not have an answer to COVID because no one has an excellent answer to COVID.
The only answer to COVID, so far as anyone is aware at this point, is the vaccine.
That's it.
The masks are not a long-term, or even medium-term, or maybe even short-term answer when it comes to the Delta variant.
There are no other answers.
You're not going to lock down forever.
You can't do that.
You're not going to tell people they can't go out of their houses forever.
You can't do that.
People are not up for that anymore.
And so if they cannot dissociate from Andrew Cuomo's actual record on COVID, they will dissociate from Andrew Cuomo on other grounds.
That is what we are seeing right here.
And that brought Joe Biden to this bizarre impasse where he had to talk about what a wonderful person and governor Andrew Cuomo was, and then express that that's why his personal behavior was sad.
Sad?
Like, did it just happen to him?
Sad is when, like, your puppy gets run over by a car.
Sad is not when the governor of the state of New York decides that he is going to grab some boob of a subordinate.
That's not sad.
That's perverse.
Here's Joe Biden making a rather large boo-boo.
How would you assess his ten and a half years as governor of the state?
In terms of his personal behavior or what he's done as a governor?
What he's done as a governor.
I thought he's done a hell of a job.
I thought he's done a hell of a job.
And, uh, I mean, both on everything from access to voting to infrastructure to a whole range of things.
That's why it's so sad.
That's why it's so sad.
It's so sad.
By the way, he didn't do a hell of a job.
He did a crappy job.
That's why all the other New York legislators are looking forward to dumping his body in a shallow grave in Iowa, politically speaking.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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Okay, so...
Biden makes that amazing statement where he says that Cuomo's done an amazing job, and that's why his behavior is sad.
Caitlin Collins, to her credit, from CNN, did a bit of actual journalism.
Not journalism-ing.
Actual journalism.
And she followed up with Biden, and she said, um, you know, you said he did an amazing job, but, um, he did sexually harass half the women he ever met in the office.
Can you really say that he has done, quote, hell of a job, that he's accused of sexually harassing women for a job?
The question is, did he do a good job on infrastructure?
That was the question.
He did.
The question was, how did he do as a governor?
No, the question was, correct me if I'm wrong.
How was he as a governor generally?
Outside of his personal behavior.
Outside of his personal behavior.
Okay.
Can you separate the two?
No, I'm not.
I was asked a specific question.
Okay, so, no, no, no.
You can't separate the two, but you can separate the two.
Weird, because we were told when Trump was president, you definitely could not separate the two.
Remember, this was Joe Biden's pitch for the presidency, is that his character made him fit for the presidency, unlike that evil, dullard Donald Trump, who was so terrible to women.
Also, we were supposed to ignore the Terry Reid allegations, because Joe Biden is obviously a wonderful, wonderful person.
Jen Psaki then tried to explain her way out of this little conundrum.
She tweeted out, President responded to a specific question today about New York Governor Cuomo's work on infrastructure.
He also made clear it was right for Cuomo to step down, reiterated his support for women who come forward, and made clear he can't separate personal behavior from other work.
Okay, unless we're talking about Tara Reid alleging that back in the 1990s, Joe Biden, then a senator from Delaware, actively digitally raped her.
I mean, that's her actual allegation, Tara Reade, from the 1990s.
And we're supposed to pretend that that never happened, of course.
Okay, so Democrats felt that this was a time to celebrate their own incredible moral compass.
So, Mehdi Hasan from MSNBC, he led the way.
He gave this whole impassioned monologue about, this just shows that Democrats are amazing at policing their own.
Now, let's just be real about this.
No, they are 100% not.
Okay, Teddy Kennedy was the lion of the Senate after leaving a woman to drown at the bottom of a river.
He ran for president again after doing that.
I believe twice.
So no, actually, it turns out you're not good at this.
Okay, he was, he was, Teddy Kennedy was doing waitress sandwiches with other esteemed members of the Democratic caucus in the Senate.
Okay, and he was the lion of the Senate.
You know what truly broke American politics when it came to forcing resignations?
I mean, that was one of them.
The other one would have been Bill Clinton.
You'll remember that Bill Clinton was impeached by the Republican House.
And the Democrats stood with him.
In fact, you had Democratic commentators like Nina Brulé from Time Magazine saying that she literally would have performed oral sex on Bill Clinton to keep abortion legal.
So no, I mean, you guys broke it.
And now you don't get to pretend that you're putting it back together.
You're the party of values?
Excuse me?
But here's Mehdi Hassan playing this game.
Republicans have been all over the Andrew Cuomo story.
But have they looked in the mirror recently?
Just take former Missouri Republican Governor Eric Greitens, who resigned in 2018 amidst an ethics probe, two criminal charges, reports he had an affair, and allegations of blackmail.
He's now running again.
It's time for the Senate.
We have even seen this on the Supreme Court.
Clarence Thomas was confirmed despite Anita Hill's accusation of sexual harassment.
So was Brett Kavanaugh more recently after Christine Blasey Ford's accusation of sexual assault.
Not a single Republican voted no on Kavanaugh's confirmation.
I like some of the examples he uses here.
He says, well, how about Eric Greitens?
Eric Greitens is going to run for Senate again.
You'll recall that in 2018, he was the governor of Missouri and he resigned in the same way that Andrew Cuomo resigned.
He also mentions in the same breath as Andrew Cuomo, about whom there was a 168 page attorney general report detailing all of the allegations.
Meri Hassan puts that in the same breath as Brett Kavanaugh, for which there was zero actual evidence of contemporaneous evidence that any of the allegations about him were true.
And also Clarence Thomas, which was rooted in one woman testifying that he said a thing to her which was unsubstantiated by any outside conduct.
So that's exactly like Andrew Cuomo, according to Meri Hassan.
No, you guys do not get to do this routine where you pretend that you have the moral high ground.
But Joy Reid is doing this.
Joy Reid?
Having the moral high ground?
Excuse me?
Joy Reid still has a job on MSNBC after it came out that she had all sorts of old blog posts that were openly homophobic.
And then she claimed, like all good journalists do, that she had been hacked.
That retroactively, somebody went back, retroactively hacked her.
That lady still has a show on MSNBC.
Here she was saying, we hold our own accountable, but the Republicans don't.
Weird, because Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib are still well-established members of the Congress of the United States.
Ilhan Omar's still on the Foreign Affairs Committee, I noticed.
And Steve King ain't in Congress anymore.
Anyway, here's Joy Reid.
Cuomo's announcement and his exit, it actually highlights a glaring double standard that we've got to discuss.
As Republicans, who for four years excused Donald Trump trying to join in on the outrage and even claim a sort of victory.
But honestly, the truth is, Cuomo's exit was entirely, 100%, the product of Democratic pressure.
Because Democrats hold their own to a higher standard of conduct.
Meanwhile, we still await the resignation announcements from alleged teen sex trafficker Matt Gaetz, creepy car guy Madison Cawthorn, and Jim Jordan.
Okay, when it comes to Jim Jordan, the allegations were that he was a member of the coaching staff at like Ohio State when one of the upper-level coaches was sexually abusing some of the people who were there.
There is no evidence he was involved in a cover-up.
And again, Democrats are somehow the people who we are supposed to believe have a higher moral hierarchy.
By the way, who else would have pressured Andrew Cuomo in New York?
Democrats literally have a supermajority in the state Senate.
There are 63 seats in the state Senate in New Jersey, in New York rather, and 43 of them are Democrats.
Who else would it have been?
Republicans?
They don't even have the capacity to bring that kind of pressure.
All of this is insane on its face.
Okay, in just a second though, I want to remind you, I just want to remind you, that while we all knew what Andrew Cuomo had done to the olds in New York, the entire Democratic Party and media establishment were celebrating him.
So don't give me the, we have high moral standards routine.
It's just nonsense.
We'll get to more of this in one second.
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A summer where you will be back out there once more.
Alrighty, so just a reminder, the same people who are proclaiming themselves the great moral standard bearers for the United States spent the entire last year pretending that Andrew Cuomo was a great governor while he was killing all the old people and covering it up.
We knew that he was doing this, by the way, last summer.
I mean, there was open reporting from a wide variety of right-wing sources about how Andrew Cuomo had changed the reporting standards in New York with regard to nursing home deaths.
But that was the exact same time the media were too busy fawning over the so-called LoveGov.
They literally called him the LoveGov.
I mean, the irony of this is just beyond the pale.
They called him the LoveGov while he was grabbing his subordinate's ass.
That's unbelievable.
Okay, here is the, just a flashback media montage of all of these people performing the human centipede on Andrew Cuomo.
Governor Cuomo out there day after day after day.
Everything Trump isn't.
Honest, direct, brave.
Real leadership of the kind the President of the United States should have provided.
Governor Cuomo is clearly living in a totally different reality, the actual one, than the President of the United States.
Governor Cuomo has become a national leader.
For a lot of people, Angel Cuomo has become the leader of the Democratic Party.
He is conveying incredible strength.
You spoke to National Guard troops today in a stirring speech that, if I wasn't listening carefully, I thought you were sending soldiers off to war.
I mean, so inspirational.
You'll recall that Trevor Noah called himself a quomosexual on air.
The one governor who's crushing it the most right now is Andrew Cuomo.
Yes.
Thanks to his handling, his approval rating has soared to a seven-year high.
And he's even becoming something of a crush for many people.
Yeah, people online are falling in love with him.
I'm not gonna lie, those people include me.
My Tinder profile now lists me as a Cuomo sexual.
Okay, Randy Rainbow, who of course puts together these very uncomfortable videos on TikTok and YouTube and Twitter, he had an entire video about how much he wanted to have sex with Andrew Cuomo.
From now on I identify as Cuomo sexual.
Randy Rainbow, you're so strong and rational. He's a smarty.
You're kind and smart. You touch my heart. Your polo shirts are nice. So I'm glad we've had my Andy.
Yeah, man.
Spent a year doing that.
Doing that.
But now I'm supposed to believe that you guys were... It was all morality all the time.
He was just so good at this.
Now, my favorite thing is that even amidst their newfound moral fervor for getting rid of Andrew Cuomo and their apparent hatred It is so funny how they bounce around on the Me Too stuff.
If it's Joe Biden, we don't pay attention to any of the Me Too stuff.
If it's Donald Trump, we pay super a lot of attention to the Me Too stuff.
If it's Andrew Cuomo, and there were sort of these dark rumors last year, then we don't pay attention to it too much.
And in fact, we actually mobilized some people who were involved with Time's Up to attack his accusers.
If, however, he becomes inconvenient, then we all remember that Me Too is still a thing.
It's really fun how that works.
Well, Democrats are having trouble right now determining whether they're actually happy or sad that Andrew Cuomo is going.
Alec Baldwin, for example, he says this is a tragic day.
He put out a statement on Twitter, quote, regardless of what you think of Cuomo, this is a tragic day.
Party politics in this country draw ambitious, but ultimately isolated, even socially maladjusted men and women who, given the current cancel culture, will likely have their shortcomings exposed and magnified.
Tragic day.
So, so tragic.
What will we do without Andrew Cuomo?
Chuck Todd was already talking comeback.
He ain't even gone yet, Chuck.
Again, give us like a minute here.
He like, he literally did not leave.
He resigned.
He's still going to be there for two weeks, presumably hoping that there'll be some miracle and he will reinstate himself.
Here is Chuck Todd suggesting a comeback already.
His career was either permanently over or almost permanently over, and he chose the path of almost permanently over.
Right? The resignation gives him, you know, we know the way our world works.
It's amazing the people we've seen make political comebacks.
You know, you can't ever rule it out.
Look, I expect in my lifetime, Andrew Cuomo to probably run for office again.
What that office is, I don't know, but that's what this resignation tells me today.
Okay, by the way, I don't think he's wrong.
I'm making fun of Chuck Tabb, but I don't think he's wrong.
I think that's why Andrew Cuomo did it.
Okay, the best take, you can always count on Jennifer Rubin for the best take.
Remember that time when Jennifer Rubin was the in-house conservative at the Washington Post?
Remember how silly that was?
Now she's just the crazy person at the Washington Post, one of many.
She tweeted out, the first New York woman governor ever.
Now, see here's...
Here's the thing, Jennifer.
You don't get to celebrate the first New York woman governor ever if she assumed the office because a man had to resign for grabbing ass.
That is not how that works.
Normally, when you talk about the first New York woman governor or something, that person has to be elected.
If you don't elect the person, we don't all get credit for that.
There is a certain irony, by the way, to the fact that the person who is taking over for Andrew Cuomo is a woman named Kathy Hochul.
So, she is an ex-representative, ex-congressional representative, Kathy Hochul.
What's hilarious about this is that the way that she apparently rises in the world, through no fault of her own, this is not her fault, is that she just comes in after a dude can't keep it in his pants and takes over his office.
That's like her actual career history.
It's really, really funny.
She became the first Democrat to represent New York's 26th congressional district in decades.
How?
Well, Republican Representative Chris Lee was caught sending shirtless selfies to a woman he met through Craigslist.
Okay, so she ended up winning that race because her Republican opponent was sending shirtless pictures on Craigslist while running for office.
So she ended up winning that race.
Then, of course, she ended up losing subsequent races.
She rebounded from there into the lieutenant governor's office and all she had to do was wait for another dude who couldn't keep it in his pants, Andrew Cuomo.
So that's pretty, I mean, listen, it does say something about male politicians that a pathway toward victory is Just be second in line behind a male politician.
Like that's pretty rich.
I'm kind of admitting to enjoying that a little bit.
But here is the bottom line.
In the end, what Andrew Cuomo's resignation says is not much about the status of democratic morality or about the status of the MeToo movement or anything like that.
It says a lot about the politically expedient way in which Andrew Cuomo was capped off the side of the road.
They shot Sonny on the causeway.
I mean, that's all that happened here.
And we can pretend that this is an act of moral virtue by Democrats or that it matters all that much.
But in the end, it really doesn't.
It doesn't.
He was inconvenient, so they got rid of him.
Okay, in just one second, we're going to be getting to the latest on COVID because the Democrats are now in full-scale Totalitarian centralization of power mode.
We'll get to that in one second.
First, let's talk about a simple fact.
You don't want to go to the auto parts store because who does?
Who's like, you know what?
Let's go hang out at the auto parts store today.
You want to wait in line.
You finally get to the front of the line.
You go through a series of questions you didn't know the answers to.
And then finally, when you get to the front of that line, then they tell you they have the part, but not in stock, and they will have to order it and upcharge you.
Or, you could just skip all of that and do all of this from home anyway with rockauto.com.
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You can competitively shop the parts over at rockauto.com right now.
Head on over there.
Remember to write Shapiro in there.
How did you hear about us box?
So they know that we sent you.
Alrighty, we'll get some more news in just one moment first.
Your reminder, you need to pick up a copy of my book, The Authoritarian Moment, because it's here.
Okay?
So, not just the book.
Like, The Authoritarian Moment itself is here.
The centralization of power in all the institutions is here.
The willingness to quash dissent from all the institutions is here.
That includes the government and non-governmental institutions that govern your daily life.
The Authoritarian Moment is about how all of our institutions were taken over by the left, and more importantly, How we coordinate to fight back.
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Alrighty.
Meanwhile, Democrats across the land are calling for centralization of power in the federal government.
Particularly Joe Biden came out yesterday and said that he is now investigating whether he has the federal capacity to crack down on states and essentially issue a national mask mandate.
Here is the president of the United States trying to centralize the power to tell Texas and Florida that they're not allowed to tell schools exactly how to operate and allow students to go to school unmasked.
I don't believe that I do thus far we're checking that we but there are on federal workforce I can't and I think that people should understand seeing little kids I mean four or five six years old in hospitals on ventilators and some of them passing not many but some of them passing
It's almost, I mean, it's just... Well, I should not characterize beyond that.
Okay, well, you shouldn't characterize it beyond that because it's factually incorrect.
Okay, there are small children who have died of COVID.
The number who died who didn't have a severe underlying condition before dying, so far as I'm aware, is currently zero.
That's according to Johns Hopkins University statistics.
As Phil Kirpin points out from American Communications, the 2009-2010 swine flu was five times deadlier to kids than COVID has been.
But nobody talks about masking up kids in schools.
The only reason we're even talking about this right now is because you have a bunch of freaked out adults and they don't understand how to read data.
And Democrats are trying to scare the living hell out of everybody so you all get vaccinated.
Listen, I would love for more people to get vaccinated.
I am very pro-vaccine.
I've had the vaccine.
My wife's had the vaccine.
My parents have had the vaccine.
I've encouraged everyone I know to get the vaccine.
But in the end, it's up to you.
You get to make the decision as to whether you think the vaccine is going to do you more harm than good.
I can, all I can do is provide you the data and then allow you the ability to make an independent decision because this is still a free country.
But Joe Biden is saying that he, like when he says he doesn't think he has the authority to do the national mask mandate stuff, but he's going to check into it.
I am less than assured considering that one week ago he said he did not have the authority to issue an eviction moratorium and then he went ahead and issued an eviction moratorium.
So I don't trust that his belief in the constitutionality of what he's doing matters one iota to Joe Biden.
So what is this?
What this is really about is pretending that Democrats have a solution when they very clearly do not have a solution.
And again, the data that that this is really dangerous for kids does not exist.
There is no data suggesting that this is a wildly dangerous virus for children.
Okay, the NIH director says this.
Here's the current, this isn't me, this is Francis Collins, the current NIH director, saying there is no rigorous data showing that the Delta variant is more dangerous to kids than the Alpha variant, and the Alpha variant is responsible for the deaths of under 400 children in the United States out of a subpopulation of 75 plus million.
Here is NIH director Francis Collins.
Is the Delta variant more serious for children?
You know, we don't have rigorous data to show for sure that they are, but I certainly am hearing from pediatricians that they're concerned that this time the kids who are in the hospital are both more numerous and more seriously ill.
We'll have to get better comparisons to be sure of that.
So, no, you don't have data.
Your anecdotal evidence is virtually meaningless.
As the Delta variant is more contagious, that means more people are going to get it.
If more people get it, more people are going to become hospitalized from it.
But that does not mean that it is more dangerous on a raw one-to-one level.
It just means more people are getting it.
What this is really about is the false suggestion that Democrats have the solution.
And this is a point of high irritation to me.
It really is.
Israel is seeing a major spike right now.
Israel went crazy with the vaccinations.
They went crazy with the lockdowns.
They are still seeing record spikes right now in Israel.
California is seeing a major spike right now in cases.
I'm vacationing in Hawaii right now, and let me tell you, Hawaii has seen a spike in cases.
And Hawaii has been locked down.
Hawaii is a mask mandate state.
I'm looking at the Hawaii case rate right now, and right now, Hawaii has been experiencing a massive spike.
Okay, as of August 9th, their seven-day rolling average is 514 cases.
Just about a month ago, it was 40 cases a day.
So what happened?
Is that Governor Ron DeSantis' fault in Florida?
Or does it turn out that this thing is really contagious, a lot of people are getting it, and that's pretty much it?
But again, Democrats have to suggest that they have the solution if only you would listen to them.
So here's Jen Psaki ripping Ron DeSantis, of course.
If you're not interested in following the public health guidelines to protect the lives of people in your state, to give parents some comfort as they're sending their kids to school.
Schools are opening in Florida this week, I know, in many parts of Florida.
Then get out of the way and let public officials, let local officials do their job to keep students safe.
This is serious and we're talking about people's lives.
Okay, no, there's no evidence that masking in schools has a huge impact.
There really isn't.
Okay, I'll give you an example.
So today, there's an article in the New York Times, and if you read the headline, You would assume that what Saki is saying is true, right?
That there's actual evidence.
Here is what the essay says.
We studied one million students.
This is what we learned about masking.
This is by Dr. Kinesia Zimmerman and Dr. Danny Benjamin.
One is an associate professor of pediatrics at Duke.
The other is a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Duke.
Here's what they say.
They say for more than a year, we've worked with North Carolina school districts and charter schools, studying the rate of new COVID cases, the efficacy of mitigation measures, such as masking, and the increased risks of participating in school-sponsored sports.
We have learned a few things for certain.
Although vaccination is the best way to prevent COVID-19, universal masking is a close second.
And with masking in place, in-school learning is safe and more effective than remote instruction, regardless of community rates of infection.
Okay, then they actually get to the data and the data don't show any of that.
They say vaccination is the strongest method for preventing the ill effects of COVID, but students under 12 are ineligible for the vaccines.
Masking, then, is one of the best, most readily available methods to protect them from disease, with universal masking being one of the most effective and efficient strategies for preventing SARS-CoV-2 transmission in schools.
So how do they know this?
According to these scientists, in July 2020, we and our colleagues developed the ABC Science Collaborative to pair scientists with school and community leaders to make sure that school leaders had the most up-to-date scientific information pertaining to COVID-19 in K-12 schools.
In conjunction with North Carolina, our collaborative collected data from more than 1 million students and staff members in the state's schools from March to June of 2021.
During that time, more than 7,000 children and adults acquired the coronavirus and attended school while infectious.
Because of close contact with those cases, more than 40,000 people required quarantine.
Through contact tracing and testing, however, we found only 363 additional children and adults acquired the coronavirus.
We believe this low rate of transmission occurred because of the mask-on-mask school environment.
Both the infected person and the close contact wore masks.
But here's the key.
Okay, this is buried way down in the article.
Because North Carolina had a mask mandate for all K-12 schools, we could not compare masked schools to unmasked schools.
Let me repeat that.
The entire article is about how masking is deeply effective.
Quote, because North Carolina had a mask mandate for all K-12 schools, we could not compare masked schools to unmasked schools.
That's the only thing we care about!
If you have no comp, what the hell are you talking about?
How am I supposed to know whether the masking was effective or not when I don't know whether an unmasked school would have done worse?
You literally have no comp.
So what did they do?
Instead, they just pulled a bunch of, like, outlying cases from Israel, for example.
They say, by contrast, one school in Israel without a mask mandate or proper social distancing protocols reported an outbreak of COVID-19 involving 153 students and 25 staff members.
So you had no comp, so you just picked an outlier and used that as your comp?
Okay, so there's a really interesting Twitter thread from a columnist, science columnist for Wired and the New York Times and the Atlantic named David Zweig.
He said, I corresponded with the authors of the Duke study behind this opinion piece weeks ago.
A top line finding of the Duke-ABC Science Collaborative report and what they claim here is that masks in schools help lower transmission.
Except all their schools were under a mask mandate.
I asked the authors how they could make a claim on masks when there was no control.
In order to claim an effect, you have to compare one group with an intervention to a second group without the intervention, which they didn't do.
Instead, they talked about this Israeli school, but... 1.
You cannot use another study as evidence for a claimed finding in your study.
You didn't do the study.
2.
The Israeli study was of grades 7 through 12.
Windows were closed.
All schools were exempt from masks.
All in Israel.
If anything, the fact that there was only one outbreak suggests the lack of effectiveness of masks.
This is absurd.
The schools in Florida and more so throughout many parts of Europe did not and do not have mask mandates for kids with varying age cutoffs.
There is no correlated explosion of cases originating in those schools.
When this particular columnist for Wired and the New York Times, this doesn't sound like a conservative columnist, when this person emailed the people who wrote for the New York Times and mentioned these points about the Israeli study, they cut off all communications.
But based on the skimpy data, we're supposed to believe that it's time to mask up all students, and if you don't, this is because you're evil, like Rhonda Tantus is evil.
See, Dr. Anthony Fauci sums it up.
Here's Dr. Fauci, the greatest of all doctors outside of Joe Biden, saying that the Florida surge was quote-unquote entirely preventable.
Okay, here we go.
Scientifically, they're going to take us continuing to escalate up and the people of Florida are going to suffer unnecessarily.
There will be unnecessary hospitalization and tragically unnecessary deaths.
That's exactly what is going to happen.
It is entirely predictable on the one hand and entirely preventable on the other hand.
If what he's talking about there is vaccines, Agree.
If what he is talking about there is the evils of Florida for not doing mask mandates, which again, do not correlate with high death rates or low death rates.
There's just no correlation.
Then he doesn't know what he's talking about.
By the way, it is worth noting that it appears that Florida has already hit its peak.
Hey, so in two weeks, nobody's going to be talking about Florida anymore.
So they may already have hit their peak.
Scott Gottlieb from the FDA says the same thing, by the way.
count by date for Florida Friday 21,500 Saturday 19,500 Sunday 15,300 and 319 so they may already have hit their peak Scott Gottlieb from the FDA says the same thing by the way so it'll be a trailing peak in hospitalizations and deaths okay but again the key comes down to here's Anthony But you're not going to get mandates centrally from the federal government.
You know what? Here's the thing.
He gets to decide for you what sort of freedoms you get to enjoy.
You would wish that people would see why it's so important to get vaccinated, but you're not going to get mandates centrally from the federal government.
But when you're talking about local mandates, mandates for schools, for teachers, for universities, for colleges, I'm sorry.
I mean, I know people must like to have their individual freedom and not be told to do something, but I think we're in such a serious situation now that under certain circumstances, mandates should be done.
Okay, that sentence right there.
I know people must like to have their individual freedom, but... There shouldn't be a but at the end of that sentence.
I know people like to have their individual freedom, Is the end of the sentence.
There's a period at the end of that sentence.
People still have a right to their individual freedom.
And yes, they bear the consequences.
Again, I'm not hearing from a lot of people who believe that they don't have to get the vaccine.
And also everybody else has to mask up around them because they have to be kept in a bubble.
Individual rights still matter in this country.
I know they don't seem to matter for an awful lot of Democrats these days.
But they still matter.
And if Democrats keep pursuing these mask mandates and lockdowns and vaccine mandates, I don't think the American people are going to respond well to this, nor do I think that they should respond well to it, frankly.
I think they should be resisting a lot of this stuff.
Because it is not rooted in reason and it is not rooted in any sort of real moral sensibility that allows for the individuality of human choice making that you don't like personally.
Alrighty, we'll be back here tomorrow with much, much more.
In the meantime, go check out the Michael Knowles show that is available right now.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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On today's episode, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo resigns, Chicago police turn their backs on the mayor, and the U.S.
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